buddd wrote:

Hello,

I have a what I believe to be a physically damaged hard drive with
data on it. (My guess it is the heads). When I turn the drive on, one
hears a knocking sound for about 30 seconds and then the drive
automatically shuts off.

The data on the drive is not important enough to pay a professional to
fix it, and software recovery tools won't work.

I would like to take the opportunity to open and try repairing the
disk myself (as a learning process).

Any suggestions / recommendations?

If the data's unimportant and recovering it isn't your goal, then you could open
it up to see what's going on.

Graham